hacker images

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Hacker Images are deliberately stereotypical staged photos of “hackers” with various aspects like darkness, zeroes and ones, one or more people wearing dark hoodies and/or sunglasses, lit only by their screens, and used in at least one article about the IndieWeb.

Hacker images Flickr prank

In the early 2010s, such a deliberately staged photo set https://www.flickr.com/groups/hacker-images/pool/ was placed on Flickr with a permissive license to see if news media would use them in articles, which they subsequently did, not knowing that the images were placed there deliberately for them to find and use.

E.g. this article:

2013-01: http://www.wired.com/2013/01/wiretap-backdoors/

Slate covered the "prank" itself:

2013-02: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/hacker_photos_how_hacker_dojo_pranked_wired_with_hilariously_stereotypical.html

Shutterstock hacker images

Subsequently there have been other similar images in the media, e.g. Shutterstock image used in these articles:

2014-10-08: http://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/indieweb and
2021-06-24: https://www.techradar.com/in/news/is-telegram-the-new-alternative-to-the-dark-web

2019-10: Why hackers will always win, and what you can do so they don’t also uses a Shutterstock image:

Other Examples

2022-02-27 CNBC: These are the 20 most common passwords leaked on the dark web — make sure none of them are yours

Whitepaper: Why Hackers Hack: It's Your Business To Care!

2022-03-31 KRON4: Apple, Meta turned over user data to hackers pretending to be law enforcement, report says

2023-03-01 How to Prevent Callback Phishing Attacks on Your Organization — hacking by phone (or phablet!) yet still in a dark hoodie:

2024-03-16 ASCII art elicits harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots

Some ASCII art of our favorite visual cliche for a hacker.

Jesse Eisenberg

Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in the movie "The Social Network"

Articles about hacker images

Articles about the phenomenon of stereotypical hacker images and stock photos:

(each of these also has even more over the top exaggerated photos to make their point)

2013-02: Slate covered the "prank" itself: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/hacker_photos_how_hacker_dojo_pranked_wired_with_hilariously_stereotypical.html
2017-05-15 Mashable: We need to talk about all these absurd stock photos of hackers / Black hoodie? Hands? Mystery? ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
2017-08-02 BBC: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?
2018-11-26: What lies behind the stereotypical image of a controversial figure: the hacker?
2020-07-20 How computer security is depicted in movies and TV
2019-07-25 The sorry state of cybersecurity imagery
2020-01-10 Security Think Tank: Hooded hackers? More like ruthless competitors

Other hacker image variants

Variants of hacker images other than the figure in a dark hoodie cliché.

Street hackers

IndieWeb Examples

2009-11-19 IndieWeb Example in the wild with Kevin Marks and Blaine Cook: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/4116861374/

Black keyboards

2022-09-13 Lorenz Ransomware Goes After SMBs via Mitel VoIP Phone Systems (js;dr) / "The ransomware gang has been seen exploiting a Mitel RCE flaw discovered in VoIP devices in April (and patched in July) to perform double-extortion attacks."